Designers are more valuable than programmers | Hacker News Reader

Designers are more valuable than programmers

spin.atomicobject.com

15 pointsshawncrowley23 comments

Depends on the project I guess.

I can't really see how a designer is going to be much help developing distributed hash tables, compilers, scalable push messaging frameworks, drivers, network analyzers, packet routing systems, load balancers, linear solvers, file systems, natural language processors, machine learning systems, and a whole host of other software that makes the world tick.

eventually, at the top of the stack, there's some one who asked the question: "how are people going to interact with this?"

my hash table is useless if the users can't tickle the UI in such a way as to use the hash table.

Your assuming a lot about what's being built. If you start designing a UI for a USB stick you have already failed. how are people going to interact with this? UC1, you plug it in and it works. UC2, you unplug it and it keeps your files. End of use cases.

That's not to say design is unimportant, just that plenty of teams are better off adding there 30th coder before their first designer. Others may be better off adding there 10th designer before there 2nd coder, but I have never heard of them.

Quite true... depends on the project.

I do not doubt that certain skills have more value than others in certain contexts but it's difficult to work on a team where the importance is emphasized.

Very funny. Reminds me of when I worked in consulting. Let's say there were 3 months to do a project. For the first 11.5 weeks, the designers would be arguing about "mood boards" and whether icons should be round or square. Then in the middle of the last week, they would hand over to the programmers a directory full of Photoshop files and say "build this" (usually the first time the programmers had even heard about the project was now).

Then the programmers would be blamed for the project overrunning. Designers need to be kept on a very short leash. Designers who can't program what they design are worse than useless.

"Ultimately, design is what drives business rules and software requirements."

Completely disagree: Business Rules drive design, not the other way around. The article muddles together product development and design and calls it the same thing. Product development incorporates BOTH design and coding - you cannot separate the two and claim one half is more important then the other.

And has already been pointed out, there are far less developers out there then designers. Guess which commodity is worth more to the average company given this fact?

From experience, I would say that a very good designer is worth considerably more to a company than a very good developer.

This comes largely from the fact that the beneficial cap in skill for designers is much higher than for developers.

With a developer, so long as they finish everything on time and it works as intended, other concerns are largely irrelevant.

With a designer, there is always room to improve, so the difference between the best designer and the next-best designer still provides some important benefits, while this is not necessarily true for developers.

Until it comes to maintenance time and you discover that your cadre of less then stellar developers has created a "works as indented" pile of excrement that is largely unmaintainable. Then the difference between the best developer and the next-best is no longer irrelevant.

In my experience, design is undervalued in most software projects, but the sentiment expressed in this article is beyond over-correction.

Fascinating - this is a terrific description of what a good product manager does, without using the term 'product manager' once.

I know designers with product skills, and I know designers without product skills. Both are still designers.

Of course, claiming any one of these skill sets is more valuable than the other is just linkbait. It's like trying to choose between your tibia and your fibula - without either, you're not going far.

I don't agree. I do think that designers are undervalued by a lot of people, but I don't think that they are more important than programmers. Especially when you factor in supply and demand- it's my perception (though I have nothing more than anecdotal evidence to back it up) that there are more designers looking for work than programmers, thus, the programmers you have are more valuable to you.

It was interesting to see the section on "programmers as designers", though. I was recently making an HTML5 app and web site to accompany it (http://www.taxono.my), and had to make up the design as I went along. I have no idea if it really looks good from a design perspective, but I couldn't justify bringing a designer in, so I suppose I am just as guilty of undervaluing designers as others are.

It looks really good! It looks like something designed by a professional. Nice job!

Thanks. I am pleased with how it's come out, it's just interesting to have no designer to externally validate it!

I think you are misunderstanding the point of Shawn's post. He is specifying that a 'programmer' is just a 'coder'. A 'developer' or 'maker' is a programmer that keeps the 'product' in scope by incorporating design as well as code. A programmer-only is being trumped by developers that always keep design and the customer in mind.

I think that trying to draw a distinction between "programmer" and "developer" isn't really a great idea, because a lot of people (myself included) would consider the terms equivalent.

In that context, it makes the title seem a little "clickbait-y". "Programmers are less valuable, except that I'm talking about a specific subset of programmers" is less catchy though, I will grant you that.

I think there are more designers than coders because the barrier to entry is far lower. Anyone can easily start designing by picking up "HTML for Dummies". It isn't going to be close to pretty but it will be published. Ask those guys to deploy something through the command line with Capistrano or rsync though and they'll look at you like you're speaking another language. It's harder to start programming. The basics might be easy at first but to build anything useful takes a lot of practice. Programming is also less forgiving. You can publish ugly brochureware easily but getting any significant program written and running is a pain as one mistake and it's throwing incomprehensible errors at the newbie programmer.

See, my first instinct is to agree with you, but I don't know. Maybe we just say these things because we know programming and not design. Meanwhile someone on a design forum is saying:

" Anyone can easily start programming by picking up "Ruby for Dummies". Ask those guys to <do a design-specific task> or <adhere to a design principle I know nothing about> and they'll look at you like you're speaking another language."

Maybe I'm wrong, though.

You're right but I think we're talking about two different things. I consider myself a generalist doing both design and programming but I don't have any formal training in the art of design. So yeah, it will seem foreign to me when someone starts speaking about white space, color theory, and all that.

What I'm talking about is the fact that anyone with little effort at all can code some HTML and CSS because they're far more forgiving. The results may come out like crap but most people (myself included) don't know good design anyway and so they end up calling themselves web designers based on some simple HTML tutorial. Getting a programming language to print out text is one thing but ask someone to do something useful. Nobody picks up a book on Ruby and builds a blog on the first try. Even the 20 minute blog tutorial is too high a barrier to entry for people without programming experience.

"Design" languages like HTML and CSS are more about memorization. Memorize the tags and syntax and you can start building and publishing crap in a few days. Programming is different. Not only do you have to memorize the syntax but you also have to apply some logic to it as well. Programming is about problem solving whereas design is about describing output. Even the examples you'll find in books don't help unless you're trying to build the exact thing as the examples otherwise you have to actually understand the underlying concepts to get a program that suits your specific needs.

Neither one is easier than the other, I will not say that. First off, it's far easier for the unqualified to call the,slaves designers than programmer. But just because it's easier to enter the design realm doesn't make it easy. Once you have a grasp of both programming and design you'll find out that both are quite complex and interconnected. Those "designers" that haven't discovered that yet are the ones I'm talking about and they're the ones I'm basing my premise of design having a lower barrier to entry on.

In my opinion, most developers can produce a good, or even great, design in acceptable time if they just wish so, while the reverse doesn't apply.

For a developer to come up with a good design, it takes: (a) common-sense, (b) compatible-to-mainstream perception of what is ugly, and (c) willingness to look around for ideas and play with things they might consider boring.

I have yet to encounter a decent developer that manages to do without (a) -hm, ok maybe I know one java developer, but he's a special case!- (b) seems about equally common and (c) is only a matter of motivation.

On the other hand, most designers I have met appear unable to try grasping and utilizing the simplest of programming concepts. I don't know if their brain is wired differently or if they despise or fear that stuff so much that their subconscious blocks anything related, but, in any way, they seem much less capable in producing any code in any amount of time, than most developers in producing a pretty and usable design in a reasonable amount of time.

That's just my simple observation, based on the 15-20 people of both professions that I know well enough.

So, for projects that want just a good design (i.e. at the level of twitter's) and not an WOW-super-original design, I think that the work is fundamentally simpler than coding, doesn't need much expertise and most developers can do it pretty well if they want. For those projects at least, which is the majority, I don't see how designers are, or should be, more valuable than coders.

For more specialized projects, like a desktop environment, usability experts and designers might be a requirement, but still, I wouldn't go as far as to consider them more valuable.

...and yet.

I like good design as much as the next person. But I'm not sure what a good design even is anymore and this article isn't helping. It's throwing a lot of concepts in that "design" bucket. Are we in the midst of a "design bubble"? Are we - as in anyone who can look at a screen and make some kind of cogent value judgment - all designers now? I'm pretty sure I've never chosen to use something (keeping in the realm of software/technology) based on what it looks like over the actual content/functionality it provided. Or is content and functionality in the realm of the designer now?

And I think this statement is highly debatable: "Programmers who prefer to be given detailed requirements and push syntax into a terminal or prefer to isolate themselves from the broader product team will have decreasing value in the world of innovation and product development."

That may or may not be true, time will tell. Too many cooks spoil the soup, you know. And in time, when we are all designers, we just might want someone to competently and efficiently push that syntax into that terminal.

Now I'm off to see if I can find any old issues of Raygun in my basement.

"Programmers who prefer to be given detailed requirements and push syntax into a terminal or prefer to isolate themselves from the broader product team will have decreasing value in the world of innovation and product development."

I don't agree with the title but I agree with this sentence. There is some software development that requires people with skills so advanced that they can really do whatever they like. But most programming is tying systems together and worrying about maintenance, error resilience and cost. While those things are certainly not easy, I think they are becoming more manageable by a broader set of people. You now can't really be a specialist (and disregard everything else and without being in the top factions of a percent of ability) in a field increasingly (successfully) filled by generalists.

I am working on my design skills by prototyping and wireframing with Photoshop. I'm not an artist or illustrator by any means, but I can design things fairly well from a high level.

The line between design and implementation is a blurry one in all fields. In some cultures, the art is the craft.

Oh boy, not another one of these. Designers and programmers need to call a truce already. One will always believe they are more important than the other because they each think in totally different terms and have totally unique perspectives on the same project.

The designer often thinks in terms of what could be. They imagine new ways of presenting information. Programmers think more in terms of what is realistic, what the rules are, and how to play by the rules while still being able to make the design a reality.

I fall into the "developer" category the article talks about. It's strange though. I don't know what others think but I always thought that designers weren't the guys who just drew designs on paper and in photoshop. I think a lot of people think of designers as "point and click" guys and programmers as "keyboard jockeys". I always perceived designers as the ones who did do the point and click stuff but also got their hands dirty in CSS, JavaScript, HTML, etc. I always thought of designers as programmers who mainly use markup, presentation, and visual effects code while programmers were the guys doing the back end work. Apparently that's now how others think.

I think both are equally important. The only one I think is less important is the designer that stays strictly in the realm of point and click, photoshop, pad and pencil work. These days as long as you can code in either the markup/style realm or the backend server side realm then you're just as valuable as anyone.

One is not better than any other. They're just different! These debates only serve to create prejudices and make it harder for the person doing the HTML/CSS to work with the guy doing the Rails/Python/PHP as one will look down their nose at the other like he's somehow inferior when they really need each other. We also need to keep in mind that when you're working on the web there's no way that you can know all there is to know to create something by yourself. We need each other. I mean, you could launch a product yourself having done both design and dev work but to grow and sustain the app you're going to need specialized people that can fill in your blind spots.

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